(Editorial note: Happy American Independence Day, or Fourth of July. In honor of the holiday, I wanted to interrupt this two-part series and insert a traditional, even for me, bit of patriotic glurge, because I really am like that. Fortunately, I came to my senses. There is nothing more patriotic, during a Presidential election year, than actually discussing with my fellow Americans what principles we want to be governed under for the next four years. So screw glurge; politics is my patriotism.)

This is another journal entry, like yesterday's, where in order to verify that I understood the facts of the matter, I had to wade through a ton of absolutely garbage journalism. Yesterday, I wrote about Democratic presidential nominee-presumptive Senator Barack Obama's announcement that he intends to vote for the current version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act renewal, the one that gives legal immunity to the telecom companies that spied on American's phone calls (whether or not anybody actually listened to the calls so tapped, it's technically still spying, technically) without the niceties of even the shallow fig-leaf of a FISA warrant application. Journalists all over the world have "knowingly" (cynically) assured people that Barack Obama doesn't "really" mean it, that he can't "really" mean to eliminate the penalties whenever the NSA taps Americans' phone calls without a warrant, that he's just pandering to the crowd who are afraid the Democrats will be "soft on terrorism." I spent yesterday's journal entry documenting the reasons why that theory is almost certainly false; it is much more likely that Senator Obama really does intend for America's spies to keep violating the law, and even the Constitution, and relying on in-agency and telco whistle-blowers to protect us from actual harm, just like every US President since Lincoln.

The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.

And in fact, even the limited extent to which the Southern Baptists have gone along with the current administration's Office of Faith-Based Initiatives has startled me. When I was being trained in Christian theology and Republican politics by Independent Baptist and Southern Baptist teachers back in the 1970s, they were entirely opposed to this kind of thing, for two solid practical reasons. First of all, they explained to me as a kid, just because your church is on the approved list for government funding this year, doesn't mean that it will be next year, not if the voters get any say in it, and we do elect a new administration every 4 to 8 years. And secondly, their own limited experience with accepting even the most indirect of government funding, through grants to private schools, left them with a sour taste in their mouths. They told me that every time, the politicians and government bureaucrats had waited until the churches' organizations were dependent on that money coming in, and then made intolerable demands in order to keep it. After one particularly horrific experience nearly bankrupted St. Louis's second-largest Protestant school back in the 1970s, the Missouri Union of Christian Schools passed a resolution forbidding any of their member schools from taking any government money. The state legislature had allocated funds "to promote physical education" by making grant money available to any school that wanted to build a gym, public or private. But then didn't allocate enough money to pay for one in one year. St. Louis Christian Academy had 2/3rds of the money they needed, paid the architect, got the permits, dug the foundation for their new gym. Then their legislator came in and said, in so many words, that the legislature was thinking of cutting off the funding to any school that didn't use the state-approved textbooks, including pro-evolution science textbooks. So SLCA said, fine, and tried to drop out of the program. The next day, a building inspector came by, asked them how they were going to finish that gym, and when he found out that no construction was ongoing, he condemned the building. It took fund-raising all across the state to raise the money in time and to pay the legal bills to fight that condemnation. So tell me why, with stories like that in circulation, churches want to let legislators and bureaucrats in Washington get their hooks into the churches' budgets? Can their greed have so thoroughly overruled their own knowledge and common sense?

What's more, at least two Christian legal organizations have already spotted one potential trap-door in Barack Obama's proposal, too, that's making them nervous. Obama gives what seems to him to be the reasonable requirement that if the taxpayers are funding someone's salary, then hiring for that job can't discriminate against applicants on religious grounds, or any other protected status like race, ethnicity, or Vietnam veteran status. He's on solid constitutional ground, there, in theory; I recall working indirectly on the case of a Wiccan clerical worker for the Salvation Army who won her case on the grounds that her duties were not in any way religious, so Sally's couldn't claim that sharing their Christian faith was a bona fide occupational qualification, a BFOQ. But as both the Center for Law and Religious Freedom and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations have pointed out, this gets problematic fast given Obama's commitment to roll these grants out to smaller and smaller churches, because those churches have hardly any paid employees, maybe even only one. Commingling of funds becomes automatic, impossible to avoid. And a commenter at the Center for Religious Freedom's blog pointed out an even bigger trojan horse in this proposal: the same law that Obama refers to covering discrimination in hiring, Title VII, is one that he's already promised gay and lesbian groups that he intends to amend to protect sexual orientation. So under Obama's proposal, any church that takes dollar one of federal funding and allows one thin dime of that money to commingle with church general revenue can no longer fire the pastor, or any other employee, if they find out he or she is gay.

But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.

So given that difference in how white Americans and black Americans feel about their churches, if you thought that America's first black President wasn't going to funnel money any which way he can to the African Methodist Episcopal church, and probably the American Baptist Church, and conceivably even smaller black denominations like the Nation of Islam, by any means possible, whether you or I or any white person likes it or not? If you think you have to make up some implausible conspiracy theory to explain why he'd suggest he wants to do so? If you think that your conspiracy theory is more likely than that he just plain likes and respects the black churches that much and wants them to be richer whatever it takes? Then I think you just plain don't know what you're talking about.

I'm a little embarrassed at how long it took me to notice the following.

Barack Obama was a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago when the pastor was Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who's said some things that a lot of people don't want a President who believes. Most of them relate to Wright's opinion that God is a god of justice, and that if chronic or widespread injustice gets ignored or papered over long enough, God takes it out on whole countries at a time, and that the US is still a country with enough systematic injustice to qualify. Whether or not you agree with his opinion about every one of those injustices, you cannot deny this: this is a religious opinion, a theological opinion. Wright's also on record has having given at least a tepid endorsement of another religious figure, Louis Farrakhan, former leader of a group that a lot of Americans don't like for their religious opinions, the black-nationalist Nation of Islam. Wright doesn't endorse everything in Farrakhan's theology, just Farrakhan as a person, saying that people don't give him enough credit for the good he's done or for being basically a nice guy; basically, Wright's opinion is that the good Farrakhan has done in his life outweighs any bad you can come up with. And in case that's not obvious, let me point out that Wright's opinion on this is also a religious opinion, just like (for that matter) the opinions of Farrakhan that most Americans abhor.

So, unsurprisingly, the American voters want to know which if any of those opinions Obama shares with Wright, and by extension with Farrakhan. The Constitution specifically says that the government can't impose a religious-beliefs test or restriction on the Presidency, but there's nothing in law or tradition that says that voters can't decide that someone whose religious beliefs are abhorrent to them might not make good decisions and vote against them on that basis. So over the past month or two, Barack Obama has come under repeated pressure to denounce Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan. In his famous speech on race and religion, "A More Perfect Union," Obama denounced some of Wright's religious opinions (without specifying which ones) but stopped short of denouncing him as a religious leader; he was already on record as having denounced both Farrakhan's opinions and Farrakhan himself.

John McCain is barely a member of any church at all, really, but in order to convince social conservatives inside the Republican Party that he was on their side, he sought out the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, who's also said a lot of things that a lot of people don't want a President who believes, about how Catholics are all dupes of Satan and about how much he's praying for all-out war in the Middle East, the whole rest of the world versus the US and Israel, so God will have to intervene. You know, really wacky stuff, but however wacky it is, you can't deny that these are religious opinions. So John McCain is starting to come under some of the same pressure that Barack Obama's been under, to denounce John Hagee. So far, all McCain has done is say that if there's anything Hagee has said that you disagree with, McCain disagrees with that, while agreeing with all the stuff that Hagee has said that you agree with. You, in particular, each and every one of you. Which is such a silly thing to say, so stupid sounding, that the pressure's not really going to let up, is it, until he's denounced John Hagee?

Hillary Clinton, as I've commented before, has her own lesser "pastor problem," namely her membership in a weekly prayer group that's lead by Doug Coe, a man who thinks that all of America's problems would be solved if Christians took "discipleship," which he defines as blind obedience to their pastors, as seriously as the mafia did, or even better, as seriously as the Nazis and the Communists did. And while I think this idea is even wackier than anything attributed to Wright or Hagee, even I would like to point out how clearly and unambiguously these are his religious opinions, as a religious leader. A few people have asked Hillary Clinton about her ongoing relationship with Doug Coe. So far her answers when questioned about it have been pretty dismissive; I think maybe she's counting on her (BS) liberal reputation to get people to think that of course she doesn't believe any of those things, so of course she doesn't need to denounce Doug Coe or his Fellowship Foundation. But a fair number of voters won't be happy until she does.

And I'm embarrassed to say that has taken me months to say, "hey, wait a minute," to realize that I have a problem with all of these demands from the voters. I don't see anything wrong with asking a politician for their own opinion. I don't see anything wrong with quoting their pastor, or anybody on the planet, to a politician and asking them if they, personally, agree with that statement. But hey, wait a minute, as I was just saying ...

Since when is it the business of a future President of the United States to denounce any religious leader in the US? Or, more sinisterly, any religious opinion held by one? Isn't that an awfully ugly thing, an awfully dangerous thing, for them to be doing? Do we really want to live in a country where religious leaders are denounced by the President, and where we judge our presidential candidates by whether or not they're willing to go on record in advance as denouncing them? Because now that I've thought of it in those terms, that sounds like the ultimate in slippery slopes to me, a class A-1 really bad idea. So maybe we should stop asking them to do exactly that, and instead ask the real question, the closest thing to a fair question in there. Knock if off with asking Obama if he denounces Wright or Farrakhan or denounces their religious beliefs; ask him (if you must) if he agrees with those specific opinions that bother you, ask him if he thinks racial injustice in America is so bad that God will punish all of us for it. Knock if off with asking John McCain to denounce John Hagee; ask him (if you must) if he thinks a nuclear war between Israel and the rest of the Middle East is a Biblical prophesy that he should fulfill, ask him if he thinks Catholics are devil worshippers. Knock it off if you were thinking of asking Hillary Clinton to denounce Doug Coe; ask him (if you don't think the question is silly) if she thinks America would be better off if everybody in America was a Christian and if all Christians obeyed their pastors with Nazi-like unquestioning obedience.

Because I've got to tell you: if I wake up and find that I'm in an America where certain pastors and certain churches are openly denounced from the White House's presidential podium, I will suddenly get even more nervous about freedom of religion in America than I already am.

Thank you, Barbara Ehrenreich (LiveJournal feed: barbaras_blog), for breaking the only news story I've heard this election cycle to scare me more than John McCain's saber-rattling about Iraq: "Hillary's Nasty Pastorate," 3/19/08. See also Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet, "Hillary's Prayer: Hillary Clinton's Religion and Politics," Mother Jones, 9/1/07.

We're all scandalized, supposedly, by the fact that Barack Obama might not have stormed out of church in a huff when he heard the US accused of state sponsorship of terrorists (when, in fact, that is exactly what the US was doing, in Nicaragua, at the time). I have a better idea than that. How about we all go way beyond scandalized, and into knee-knocking terrified, when we find out that for 15 years now, Hillary Clinton's regular church services have been with a Dominionist group called The Fellowship Foundation, aka "the Family," aka "the Fellowship," a group of very wealthy and powerful fundamentalists whose goal is nothing less than the overthrow of the US constitution and its replacement with the King James Bible, lead by Doug Coe? According to Ehrenreich, for the last 7 years, since her election to the US Senate, she's been a member of the group's inner circle.

(See also Jeff Sharlet, "Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats," Harper's Magazine, March 2003, and the book that apparently broke the story on the Clinton/Dominionism connection, Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, Harper Press: 2008.)

Nor is she shy about it; just overlooked by people who don't realize what it means when she praises guys like Doug Coe, or when she selectively quotes the Scriptures she does when she uses her alleged Christian faith as proof that she's more electable than Barack Obama or John McCain. People don't realize, heck I didn't even realize, that she isn't pandering, or kidding, or being any kind of ecumenical (let alone legitimately spiritual) Christian; she's talking very specifically about the explicitly Satanic counterfeit Christianity I wrote about at length in my 2004 series, "Christians in the Hand of an Angry God" (parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5) -- the so-called "Christianity" that elevates Republican Party expediency and the economics of Ayn Rand above the explicit teachings of Jesus Christ.

Her oft-stated admiration for Doug Coe goes a long way towards explaining what a so-called feminist was doing championing a bill that would allow anti-abortion cops to refuse to guard abortion clinics, allow right wing fundamentalist pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for birth control pills. But then, in all her time in politics, I've never even heard of Hillary Clinton advocating for more rights, or better defense of the rights, of any American woman except for one. Hillary Clinton's "feminism," so far as it applies to American women, starts and stops at her stalwart, life-long defense of her god-given inalienable right to be President. Other women? She's always been too busy helping appoint Satanic Ritual Abuse prosecutors like Janet Reno to high positions of power, helping Wal-Mart defend itself against lawsuits by women who've proven that Wal-Mart is prejudiced against female applicants for managers' jobs, and holding weekly prayer meetings with anti-gay colleagues like Rick "man-on-dog" Santorum to even listen to what other women need or want, let alone care.

It's been suggested by some that Hillary Clinton's mentorship under Doug Coe and others from the religious right, like her years spent on the Wal-Mart board of directors, is not principled, but opportunistic. The best-case-scenario, one that some are arguing for without giving any evidence, without showing any reason to think they might be right, is that Hillary Clinton has spent her life sucking up to, and pretending to go along with, wealthy right-wingers in hopes of suckering them into complacency, that she's just biding her time until the glorious day when she can assume her rightful place as Ruler of the Free World, and then, oh, then, she'll show them (and us) her true liberal feminist stripes. 30 years ago, maybe that even was what she was thinking. But even if it's true, she's spent that whole 30 years marinating in the right-wing Republican and Christian Dominionist world-view. When she thinks about problems now, she thinks about them using their framework, describes them using their terms, evaluates them based on principles she's absorbed from them. One of the most important points Sara Robinson made in her excellent three-part series on the history of how conservatives out-maneuvered progressives and liberals to rule the country (Campaign for America's Future, "Learning from the Cultural Conservatives", parts 1, 2, and 3) is that from that movement's very beginning, they've known something very important: you don't have to tell a politician how to vote, if you control how they think.

Before I can recommend this book -- and I do recommend it, if tepidly -- but before I can recommend this book, there's something I need to tell you that will put my recommendation in a kind of context for you. I am deeply fascinated by the topics of this book. I went into this book with a reasonable hope of mining it for some material for the "forbidden lore" book that I'm still half-heartedly working on. I had my own personal reasons for wanting to know everything that was in this book, reasons I'll get into in a moment. And it came very highly recommended to me, both by a couple of friends and by experts in the field that I trust and by some of the top book reviewers. And knowing all of that, what I need to tell you to put it all into perspective is ... it took me months to finish this book. By comparison, that font of numbing madness The Golden Bough was a quick afternoon's light beach reading.

Robin Lane Fox's 1986 book Pagans and Christians is subtitled (pedantically) "Religion and the Religious Life from the Second to the Fourth Century A.D., When the Gods of Olympus Lost Their Dominion and Christianity, with the Conversion of Constantine, Triumphed in the Mediterranean." (At least, that's what's on the cover of my edition; apparently later editions condense the subtitle substantially.) That's not a bad summary of the material covered, but a rotten summary of the premise, which goes something like this. Between around 1979 and 1985, there came to be published an awful lot of scholarly compendia of really good primary source archaeological material from the 2nd through the 4th centuries, especially from Egypt and Asia Minor. Lane Fox's idea was to try to use that material to see what the physical evidence, and what the contemporary non-Christian written evidence (especially unofficial stuff like letters and wills), had to say about the rate of spread of Christianity over the first 250 or so years after Jesus' death, and see if that archaeological record could be squared with the version of church history that the church itself compiled, and that it teaches to this day in seminaries. That same church history gives a very important narrative explanation of not just how fast Christianity spread, but how and why Christianity spread. Lane Fox set out to see if their explanations of why and how could also be squared with the archaeological record.

Conclusion? No. Not even close. Church history is largely a pack of heavily biased lies. Now, honestly, how surprising is that, anyway? Victors write the histories, and during the Dark Ages it pretty much was the Christians who wrote the history of the Roman Empire. It's entirely unsurprising that they remember themselves as the good guys, the non-Christians and various Christian heretics as bad guys, themselves to have been continuously and bitterly hunted down for persecution and slaughter by the bad guys, and their ultimate success to have been both inevitable because of their innate goodness and yet somehow evidence of God's miraculous power at the same time. I'm not saying that a history that says that has to, by definition, be false, but let's face it -- it's what they'd say, and even believe after a generation or two, whether it was true or not, now, isn't it? What Lane Fox gets credit for, among professional historians, is for realizing that late 20th century scientific techniques of history and archaeology provide ways of treating church history as a testable hypothesis: if history had happened the way that the church fathers said it did, then when historians looked in certain places they would have to find certain kinds of evidence. If no such evidence is found, then the hypothesis founders.

But here comes the first thing that makes the book a slog to get through: Lane Fox knew that in no small part he was writing for a very hostile audience. The particular historical specialty that he was writing about is one that's heavily dominated by theologians, for whom the historical record left by the church fathers was established history, long settled and long-ago proven. Knowing this, when he sets out his experimental proofs and then when he lays out the archaeological and epigraphical and historical evidence, his text can most charitably described as excruciatingly methodical. A less charitable way to put it would be to call it plodding. I found it terribly hard to read more than a half dozen or ten pages in a sitting if for no other reason than I kept wanting to yell at him through the page, "okay, get on with it already!" And in particular, the thing that I wanted him to get on with was to answer the question, "okay, if it didn't happen in the way that the church fathers said and for the reasons they said, how and why did it happen?" If, has he demonstrates, Roman government was no more corrupt or disrespected than it had been any time in the previous four or five centuries, if upper class financial and sexual corruption were no more awful nor any more complained about than any time in the previous four or five centuries, if the impact of the philosophers and other atheists over pagan religious sentiments can be shown to have been negligible at the time that Christianity experienced its greatest growth, if the supposed inevitable drift towards mysticism and monotheism can be demonstrated to have been non-existent, if pagan oracles and the public celebrations ordained by them were experiencing their greatest popularity and growth at exactly the same time that Christianity was growing, and if failures of Christianity can be shown to have been blamed by the public for just as many or more natural and economic disasters as the supposed failures of the pagan gods (all of which points Lane Fox demonstrates and weary but irrefutable length), then, well, what did happen?

And that leads to the second thing that made the book a bit of a slog to get through. As he was making these arguments, I kept looking at the structure of his arguments, and the conclusions to the sections and chapters, for clues foreshadowing the ultimate explanation that I assumed he must have been leading towards. And I kept scratching my head and concluding that maybe I was missing the point. No, I wasn't. He doesn't really have an explanation, or at least he didn't in 1986 when he finished the book. That was a heck of a shame, when I realized it, because one of the things I was hoping to get out of this book was an answer to the question, why did it work when Emperor Constantine ordered his subjects to change religion if it didn't work when Emperor Julian gave the same order going back the other way? I finished the book somewhat disappointed ... but only somewhat disappointed. Lane Fox is much more confident of his refutation of the arguments in church history than he is in his own hypotheses, but scattered throughout the books are hints towards some alternate hypotheses.

One trend that Lane Fox shows clearly that Christianity benefited from was a weird Roman fad of the late 1st and early 2nd century, but not the one you're thinking of (mystery religions, I'm assuming). See, the Zealot Rebellion, Israel's attempted secession from the Roman Empire, struck at the Roman Empire's self image the way 9/11 struck at America's. And then as now, it created a fad among public intellectuals and shallow poseurs, people like myself now, to want to understand the enemy, to want to understand what drove this weird alien culture to such desperate acts of suicidal terrorism. The net effect on the Roman Empire was a brief fad for "Chaldeanism," driven by educated Romans' and Greeks' being impressed by one particular claim that the Jews made, namely that their religious and spiritual traditions were continuous and at least 2500 years old at the time, that they went all the way back to primitive Babylonia without any changes in between. Poppycock, of course, albeit poppycock that's still taught in some churches and synagogues today. But in a culture that revered ancient tradition but that had no meaningful history that went back more than 800 or 1000 years, a claim to a 2500 year history was inherently impressive. Except, of course, that because of the rebellion Jews themselves were seen as recalcitrant, stubborn, crude, murderous savages -- spiritual and educated, but savage nonetheless. In its early years, Christian preachers cheerfully traded on the curiosity and spiritual appetites of people who were all too eager to learn the secrets of ancient Chaldean religion so long as they didn't have to learn it from those icky Jews. But, Lane Fox shows, that didn't get them much farther than Asia Minor and a few scattered wealthy households in the western empire, in maybe a half dozen or dozen cities.

In his nicest piece of historical detective work, Lane Fox shows how the next phase of Christian expansion was, well, something of a sleazy scam, and that it was public outrage over the perceived sleaziness of that scam that sparked off periodic bouts of brief localized persecution. See, he shows that it happened like this: an early theological understanding of the doctrines of Christ and of Paul was that baptism washes away all sins that you've committed up to the point of your baptism ... but that those are the last sins you can ever have forgiven, after that you better watch yourself. In those first couple of centuries, this lead to a kind of spiritual athleticism, as Christians openly competed over who could be the least tempted by sin, with the highest prizes going towards people who swore off sex. This cult of virginity didn't require that you had never had sex, only that you never had sex ever again after you were baptized. But a century or so in, Christian bishops in Egypt and Asia Minor stumbled upon an interesting quirk in Roman inheritance law. It wasn't uncommon of Roman men, worried about the mothers of their heirs possibly dying in childbirth, to insist on marrying very young women. But this meant that any woman who did survive the birth of the requisite number of heirs and spares was almost certainly going to outlive her husband. Who inherits his wealth? The compromise that Roman law worked out was that in a narrow legal sense, she did. The catch was that the law gave her almost no legal way to spend any of it, with the intention of thereby forcing her to remarry, and thereby pass that wealth on to a new husband who would take it over and control it. What the bishops discovered after the first time or two that they converted wealthy widows was that the cult of secondary virginity left them unable to remarry. Not marrying left them in ownership of substantial wealth. And the bishops figured out ways for those widows to legally transfer their late husbands' wealth, in steady dribs and drabs, to the local Christian poor -- and, of course, to the local Christian bishop. Any substantial sums of money that she gifted to these "temples" that existed only in the widows' own back rooms was in theory being spent by the bishop, but the bishop knew which side his bread was buttered on; she controlled his budget, including his salary.

Lane Fox shows that as this idea spread, it had three consistent results. One, an awful lot of rich women saw this as a great way to gain economic independence in a male-dominated world, and eagerly converted to Christianity, sometimes not even waiting until their husbands died. Secondly, crowds of wealthy and politically powerful regional officials saw these filthy hippy homeless guys moving into these rich widows' houses, presumably seducing them without marrying them, and tricking these women into liquidating great estates and powerful investment businesses that the local economy depended on to hand out to that worthless perverted hippy "bishop's" equally filthy and sick and dirt-poor moocher friends; unsurprisingly, they often got permission from Rome to crack down on this and chase them out of town. But thirdly, since when push came to shove what the bishops were doing was legal and since so few actual sexual scandals were ever proven, it did establish a Christian reputation for being a counter to some of the more obscene accumulations of wealth in the late Roman empire, it gave Christians the budget to begin to compete at least halfway successfully with the Pagan temples in public generosity and public charity.

But even then, Lane Fox shows beyond all shadow of a doubt, before Constantine's conversion the total Christian population of the empire probably didn't amount to more than a couple of percent. That brings him up to Constantine himself. Lane Fox sees Constantine as a scheming small-time politician, stinging over his relatively modest family background and perceived snubs, who through sheer ambition clawed his way up into one of the seats on the Tetrarchy, the four-way division of imperial authority that was what passed for a system of checks and balances in the wake of the last round of Roman constitutional reforms. It wasn't enough for him. He used what authority he had to raise an army that he believed was big enough to (deeply illegally) crush and subjugate the other 3 Tetrarchs, to make him the absolute unitary monarch of Rome. The catch was that no Roman army would march into battle without "favorable omens," that is to say, without at least one priest of at least one religion who was willing to sign off and say that in his opinion, this battle was okay with at least one of the gods. And since what Constantine was trying to get religious permission to do was to stage a military coup d'etat that would destroy the balance between the four branches of government, to his consternation Constantine found out that not one single pagan priest anywhere he could find could be bribed enough to bless his attack on the other three tetrarchs. Lane Fox's interpretation of the conversion of Constantine, "in hoc signe vinces," is that Constantine finally did find one religious official who would sign off on his war: a Christian bishop. That bishop was taking, if I may call it that, one hell of a gamble, blessing an aggressive civil war. But the gamble paid off: Constantine won.

And what Lane Fox shows is that the effect on Constantine himself was probably unpredictable, even by that bishop. Constantine's ego was so immense that he spent the rest of his life citing it as proof that the Christian god was the only real god that only the Christian god has been smart enough to recognize that Constantine should be the unchallenged emperor of the whole world. Since none of the other gods had been willing to sign off on Constantine's dictatorial reign, they were obviously false gods. So, okay, you can see the Roman people rolling their eyes over this ... privately. Lane Fox shows that (unsurprisingly) the various government officials in Constantine's government couldn't tell, themselves, how seriously Constantine actually meant this, or what that meant that they were supposed to do. But eventually they figured it out because Constantine's actions made it clear for them. No Roman citizen would have been scandalized by his first step; Constantine diverted a good chunk of his own wealth, and his modest personal slice of the Roman government budget, to subsidizing the temples of his own favorite god. This was a long-standing perq of Roman government, one that the tetrarchs had enjoyed themselves. Nobody thought it terribly scandalous because taste in gods changed with every change at the top of the government, eventually everybody got their turn, and it's not like these were the only public contributions going to temples. On the contrary, in the early chapters Lane Fox showed that what drove the successes of the pagan temples and oracles in the 2nd and 3rd centuries was a Roman formalization of an earlier custom: certain powerful Imperial and regional political offices were only offered to people with a reputation for having demonstrated their "civic mindedness" by having donated large sums of money to at least one temple. Which temple? Didn't matter, as long as it was local. But then Constantine dropped his real bombshells: he declared a specific tax exemption only on inheritances that were donated to Christian churches, and he showed a marked preference for Christian officials for the really important public government offices. It didn't take very many years of that, and unfortunately Constantine had enough years, for the wealthy people who'd always funded paganism for centuries before that to get into the habit of equally competitively funding Christianity, and Christianity only. Pan didn't die of shame, he didn't die because of Christ's sacrifice, he didn't die of rising public apathy. He was starved to death.

As you can tell from this summary, I'm very glad I read this book, because I got a lot to think about out of it. But I'll tell you what, though: it's not enough to want to know what's in this book, you've got to be really highly motivated if you're going to finish it. So if you're really highly motivated, I recommend this book. Otherwise, you can probably stand to skip it.

Some gay men and some lesbians will tell you that they've always known that they only people they were romantically and/or physically attracted to were the same gender as themselves. Some of them. Not many. Heck, most heterosexuals never think very much about who or what they're attracted to much before junior high school, and their orientation is the one that everybody assumes in the absence of evidence to the contrary. So, plain and simply, a large majority of homosexual Americans grew up just naturally assuming, as a matter of course, that they weren't gay. And, doubtless, once they first started thinking about it they breathed a sigh of relief that they weren't gay.

It's been over 30 years since the American Psychiatric Association declared that being gay isn't a mental illness, almost 40 years since the Stonewall riots, and almost sixty years since Albert Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and a hundred and twenty years since the first scientific psychologist to study the subject came to the same conclusion and published it in his book, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. You'd think that some time in the last 30 or 40 or 60 or 120 years society would have come to terms with the fact that being gay is just a random and essentially uninteresting fact about some subset of the population, no weirder or sicker or even more or less rare than having blue eyes or being left handed, wouldn't you? Hasn't worked out that way yet. There are places where homosexual women and men can find reasonably safe, almost normal lives. There are jobs and industries where there are no barriers to a normal, productive career. There are families that don't disown and cast out their children, don't cut them off from all help when they get in trouble, if they find out that their child is a gay man or a lesbian. Such places, such careers, and such families are, however, still more the exception than the rule. For everybody else, finding out that you're gay means that you've suddenly got no family, no home, and your career is over before it even began. Even before you factor in the incredible amount of violence aimed at them, it's no surprise that the suicide rate is dangerously high.

Even those who do face the prospect of losing everything because they're not as heterosexual as they hoped they would be often experience grief over the life they had imagined for themselves, the life that is forever lost to them. And that very definitely begins with denial, anger, bargaining and depressing, before reaching acceptance -- and some of them never make it as far as acceptance that their fantasy heterosexual normal life is dead. Denial: "I'm not gay!" Anger: "It's those evil gays who are tempting me, I wish they were dead!" Gods help us, bargaining: "God, I'll dedicate my life to your service if you'll cure me of being gay." And, unsurprisingly, depression: "How much longer can I keep up this charade, and why do I even bother when my life is so ruined?"

Yeah, about that bargaining phase? There are pretty much only two religions in America that promise that they can pray away the gay: (fake) fundamentalist Christianity and the Church of Scientology. And people who desperately need their lives to be normal don't join the Scientologists. And fundamentalist (anti-)Christians have added a blasphemous 11th commandment to the laws of Moses: upon pain of damnation, thou shalt support the Republican Party. And that, my friends, I think is why when you hear about a married nationally famous politician being caught propositioning an undercover police officer that he thinks is a gay male prostitute in a men's room with a reputation as a gay hangout, it is such a safe bet that the politician in question is a Republican from the religious-right wing of the party. That is my theory as to why the Republican party has such a long-standing and severe "bathroom problem."

Washington (state) law currently says that if a woman goes into a pharmacy for any medication (for specific example, emergency contraception) and the pharmacist believes it would violate his religion's rules to give it to her, he can refuse to do so ... if, and only if, there is at least one other pharmacist on duty at the same time in the same location that has no such objection, and that pharmacist sells her the medicine. If no such non-objecting pharmacist is available at that moment, the law requires him, on penalty of losing his license, to violate the rules of his or her own religion and sell her the medication. Two Catholic pharmacists in Seattle, and their Catholic boss, are suing in federal court, claiming that the law in question violates the Constitution's prohibition on any law that prohibits the free exercise of religion. (See Curt Woodward, "Pharmacists sue over morning-after pill," Associated Press, 7/27/07.)

They're screwed. They are completely out of luck. They don't have a leg to stand on. Had this case been filed between 1973 and 1989, they still might have lost, but at least there would have been some issue of fact to adjudicate, and had the facts been ruled in their favor, they might have won. Since 1989? Forget it. Unless some judge thinks that this time the Supreme Court is finally willing to reconsider the 1989 Oregon v Smith decision, it will almost certainly be dismissed after a single hearing at the lowest federal court level, and dismissed without even that much of a hearing at every level from there on up. And there is no reason to think that the Court is at all interested in reviewing Oregon v Smith, since they've been asked to do so over and over and over again. If anything, the latest two judges to be appointed are probably less likely to overturn that decision, not more so.

The plain language of the First Amendment was written, of course, in 1789. It took the Supreme Court 184 years to come up with a clear, easy to understand, entirely fair and reasonable set of rules and procedures by which anybody honest could come to agree on whether or not a particular law or regulation or other government action was an unconstitutional prohibition of the free exercise of religion. (In 1989, it took Antonin Scalia about a month to tear that all down. No surprise, that; it always takes less time to destroy something beautiful than it takes to make it.) What's a religious exercise? A religious exercise is anything that your religion tells you to do or to not do, that's easy. What's a religion? The Supreme Court thrashed around for a century and a half on that one. First they ruled case by case; eventually they were pressured to come up with something more predictable and less arbitrary. Several entirely laughable attempts later, they came up with a beauty, copied largely out of some ideas from William James' Varieties of Religious Experience. A religion is a set of beliefs "related to matters of ultimate concern," that is to say, having something to do with god or the gods, the spirit world, the origin of the universe, the origin of life, the nature of the soul, and what happens after death. It must also "prescribe a code of conduct," include a set of religiously-mandated rules to tell believers what is right and what is wrong. And, and here's the kicker, it must be "sincerely held." What that last part means is that you continue to argue for the rules laid down by your religion even when they're not to your advantage. The final question adjudicated was, under what circumstance if any can the government violate the plain language of the First Amendment and make somebody obey a law even if it does contradict a belief that passes all three of those tests? And the Court's answer was, two tests must be met. The law must be one of "compelling state interest," which meant that it was so important that the law apply to everybody that civilization itself would be at jeopardy if anybody got to break it, and if there is a compelling interest, this law must be the least restrictive possible law, the one that infringes on religious expression the barest minimum necessary to uphold that interest.

This sounds a little complicated if you've never seen it before, but really, it was elegant in its simplicity: test the religious expression against three tests, all of which it must meet. If it passes, test the law itself against two tests, both of which it must meet. If the religious expression fails or the minimum infringement and compelling state interest tests pass, the law stands. If either decision goes the other way, or both, that person (and everybody else of the same religion) gets an automatic court-ordered exemption from the law or the law has to be rewritten. This system lasted for sixteen years, and I never heard any serious argument that any of the decisions that came out of it were unjust to either the government or the religious complainers. When all was said and done, people who'd lost might well still believe that the facts were on their side, but nobody disputed that the courts had looked at the right set of questions, had tried honestly to settle the only relevant facts.

Antonin Scalia thought that stunk on ice, and as far as we know, he still does. He's taken a ton of abuse for his position, laid out in the body of Oregon v Smith, that democracy itself cannot survive if there's anybody who gets to break any law, however minor and for any reason, once that law has been passed by a majority or their elected representatives. He imposed a much harder test for infringment. Under the Smith test, a law impermissibly infringes on your religious expression if and only if it does so by name. If the law was written to single out your religion by name, or to only protect certain religions by name, then it's unconstitutional. If the majority, either of the voters or the legislators, passed a rule that infringes on your religious expression for any reason other than dislike of your religion or preference for their own, then tough. Scalia called these rules "laws of general applicability."

The toner wasn't cool on this ruling before the entire country was in an uproar. The most amazing political coalition of my lifetime, even more remarkable than the one that ended the Vietnam War, sprung up as fast as leaders of a hundred groups, most of whom hated each other, could dial the phones. The Coalition for Religious Freedom included both the ACLU and the anti-ACLU ACLJ. It included both the Southern Baptist Convention and Covenant of the Goddess. It included the National Council of Churches and the Freedom from Religion Foundation. It included both Circle Sanctuary and the Temple of Set. It included both the Ku Klux Klan and the Southern Poverty Law Center. You know what? When both the American Council of Catholic Bishops and Planned Parenthood agree that you got it wrong, you probably got it wrong, okay? But you can't tell that to Antonin Scalia. Congress tried repeatedly to extend the previously agreed upon protections against discrimination by law, and the Supreme Court kept ruling that they had no authority to do so. Plaintiffs go up every couple of years to try to get the Court to overturn Oregon v Smith and go back to the old constitutionality tests, and the Supreme Court keeps declining to hear the cases without comment. As far as this Court is concerned, the "general applicability" test is settled law.

Interestingly enough, some cases have met that bar. You may remember one from the 1990s: Santeria Church of Babalu Aye versus the City of Hialeah, Florida. When Babalu Aye opened in Hialeah, the city passed a law banning animal sacrifice. With an eye to the Smith test, they specifically crafted it so that it applied to all religions, not just Santeria. The court struck it down anyway -- but only on very narrow grounds. The plaintiffs turned up recordings of the city council meetings in which the rule was debated in which it was clear that the reason for the rule was to block the Santeros from opening a church in Hialeah. In other words, animal sacrifice got ruled constitutionally protected ... but, contrary to how most people ignorantly misunderstood the court's ruling, only in cities where the law was written for the specific reason of keeping out Santeros.

So unless these Catholic pharmacists and their Catholic boss can show that the intent of the Washington state legislature was to discriminate against Catholics, they're tough out of luck.

Is this a good thing? No. Yes, I support ready access to emergency contraception, but not for the reasons that Scalia would give. (At least, I'm assuming that he'll still give them, now that it's his own religion's free exercise that's being trampled on. Is Scalia's belief in the "general applicability" test "sincerely held"?) I actually think that this law could have been upheld under the older tests. Preventing women from denied medicine that they're legally entitled to strikes me as a compelling state interest, and by encouraging pharmacies to schedule at least one non-objecting pharmacist on duty at all times, it seems to me to have done so in the least restrictive way. But here's the thing: those are questions a court would have had to answer. The pharmacists and their boss would have had recourse to a court to argue those facts. The court would hardly have had to ask the "ultimate concern" and "code of conduct" questions. Although it certainly would have been interesting to ask the pharmacists, "What if it were your daughter and she'd been raped?", it's hardly unthinkable that they would have answered that they would turn her down, too. (Disgusting and inhuman, yes. Unthinkable, no.) That would have left it up to the state to demonstrate to the court's satisfaction that their interest was compelling, and that they'd tried to come up with the least restrictive way to meet that interest they could. And here's the beauty of the old system: if the pharmacists, or anybody on their behalf, could come up with a way to uphold that compelling interest that was less restrictive of the Catholic pharmacists' religious exercise than the one the state came up with, then they would have been exempted from the law, and the state legislature would have had to rewrite their laws to match the newer, less restrictive scheme. Everybody benefits. Or, rather, prior to 1989, everybody would have benefited.

Now, until some future Supreme Court comes to regard Oregon v Smith the way I do, that is to say with the same repugnance that current courts have when they look back on Dred Scott v Sandford, they're just going to have to choose between obeying their religion or keeping their jobs, and no court gets a say in it.

Neopaganism (the religion and not the early-2oth-century literary and artistic movement) is a term that was coined by an old St. Louis hippy science fiction fan, then still calling himself by his real name, Tim Zell, in a commune in University City, to describe a syncretic religious movement combining the best of Diannic Witchcraft, Gardnerian Witchcraft, Discordianism, Thelema, west-coast Reformed Druidism, high ceremonial magic, several flavors of pre-Christian reconstructionist polytheism, and a kind of hippy panentheism that coalesced around the borrowed name "Church of All Worlds." A compromise sort of "Franken-religion" was built out of all these parts by Zell and his various contributors over the course of the late 60s, thrashed out in the pages (and especially the letter columns) of an Amateur Press Association magazine called Green Egg.

Isaac Bonewits, founder of three different attempts at reformed or re-created druidry and one of the early enthusiastic contributors to this project has long had a standing bet that it is impossible to complete the sentence "Pagans all believe ..." with anything and have it be true. I will never forget the first time I heard him say this, at a workshop at the 1985 or '86 (I forget) Pagan Spirit Gathering in Wisconsin. Some tiny little college student jumped up and said, "That's not TRUE! For example, we're all opposed to nuclear power!" She would have been hard pressed to pick a worse example; within seconds the whole workshop was on their feet, divided up into warring camps, literally screaming at each other for several minutes. Two equally divided camps. That being said, when it comes to theology, there is if not an actual agreement then certainly a very widely held attitude about the divine, and it goes approximately like this (with, of course, ample wiggle room for people to differ on the finer points at almost Talmudic length): the entire universe is alive, and divine. That divinity expresses itself first through two generic divinities; the horned hunter God of the sun and the maiden-mother-crone triple Goddess of the moon; all other Gods and Goddesses are special cases of or avatars of or misunderstood aspects of those two facets of the divine universe.

It's also fundamental to Neopaganism, at least where I live and as I see it in my Neopagan friends, that you don't have to believe any of that to be literally true. Some large percentage, probably approaching half, are for all practical purposes secular humanist agnostics or atheists to whom the god(s) and goddess(es) of Neopaganism are merely convenient spiritual or artistic symbols. In fact, if you count in the further large percentage of Neopagans who believe that The God and The Goddess exist because they're projections of our own human collective spirit, collective unconscious, and that what we're really worshipping are things that we made up ourselves? Then the percentage of Neopagans who believe that the gods aren't "really real" probably approaches the high 90% range. And they're okay with that. And frankly, as someone of a very scientific bent, when I left Christian fundamentalism so was I.

And of course, where Neopaganism takes the very specific form of Neopagan Witchcraft (which it pretty much does everywhere in this man's town), where the borrowings from Gardner and Starhawk are the thickest, you get that idea married to a pseudo-history that is, frankly, sillier than the Operating Thetan material from Scientology's claim that all human souls are reincarnated alien criminals, no, worse than that, even sillier than the Book of Mormon's claim that the Olmecs were Jewish: the belief that for all of human history there have been Goddess-worshipping, nature-worshipping herbalists and conjurers who called themselves "witches." You know what? When Margaret Murray and J.G. Frazer were publishing their separate but similar hypotheses to this effect a hundred years ago, this was vaguely plausible, just as a hundred years ago it would have been hard to disprove the Book of Mormon's claim that the Olmecs were the lost twelfth tribe of the Jews. Sorry, in both cases history and archeology continued to progress. And this leaves Neopagan Witches in an awkward position. While they keep insisting that their religion is, in some way, older than the late 19th century, if you compare what we know now about medieval (let alone pre-Christian) Europe with the parts of The Golden Bough that have since been discredited scientifically, the Wiccans are 100% on Frazer's side.

In its earliest forms, the old English word "witch" (however you spell it) doesn't mean any kind of a human, let alone a member of some religion. It's used synonymously with "pixie." In particular, a "witch" is a creature it is too small to see with the naked eye, that travels on the wind, and causes fevers, sickness, crop blight, and miscarriage. Historically speaking, witch is their word for "germ." Until Renaissance times and the sick inquisitorial fantasy that there were Satan-worshipping home churches like the secret Jewish reconverso synagogues that they were used to rooting out and slaughtering, and until they in their misunderstanding picked up the old English word for "disease-causing organism" and applied it to those fictional devil-worshippers, you cannot find any historical reference to any person being called a witch. At most, what you find is some kind of specialist in curing people of diseases caused by witches ... not witches, but witch doctors.

Now, when I thought that there were no true religions, that all human religions were human-made creations, I was perfectly comfortable with the idea that a fiction that was invented in the 1890s or the 1950s or the 1960s or even day before yesterday was just as spiritually valid as one that was made up in the 1500s or the 300s or before. But I'm afflicted with a curse: I am, at least in some situations, an Authenticity Cop. Once I get interested in something, I want to wallow in not merely tertiary but secondary sources, and primary sources if I can read the language they're in. And in the process of expanding my Neopagan spirituality, and studying as many pre-Christian pagan sources as possible, something really weird and inexplicable happened to me: piety.

Scattered among all of the ancients' (and even moderns') writings about the gods there are several historical periods where it is widely attested by multiple sober and generally reliable sources that beings who looked much like us, but had abilities far beyond those of mortal humans, walked among us. Whether we're talking about the djinn living in the Arabian and Sahara deserts, the faerie folk living in northern Europe, the angels seen by members of various Mesopotamian tribes, or the gods seen everywhere throughout the Peloponnese and Ionia, they are described with clarity and a degree of precision, and with an inescapable consistency. They claimed to have been here before, but to only have mingled openly with us in the aftermath of civilization-threatening disasters. At such times, they taught the survivors of various disasters like the fall of Bronze Age civilization or the fall of the Roman Empire various useful arts, married into and/or generally left children with various families, and handed out rewards and punishments for various virtues and vices among those who were organizing the reconstruction efforts in an attempt to make sure that viable societies arose. It's popular now to insist that these beings were fictions made up by people long after the fact who were embellishing the oral historical record for their own purposes. Maybe that's what you believe. It's not what I believe.

I don't know who or what those beings, those people, were, or where they came from. I don't know if they're in any way still here, watching us, although for a couple of generations after they withdrew from common contact they kept showing up to give nasty surprises to those who thought they could get away with stuff because the gods were no longer watching. But I honor them, now, not made-up gods of philosophers or hallucinated gods of mystics and other schizophrenics. And in particular, I honor the gods of one particular place and time, the gods who helped the Greek-speaking survivors of the end of the Bronze Age, for having hammered out a unique compromise way of life that was even better than the aristocratic monarchies the gods left behind everywhere else: freedom and democracy and entrepreneurial capitalism. All ideas that came from men, and that were sold grudgingly to the gods, but causes that a particular set of gods took up as their own after seeing just how much prosperity and (just as importantly) how much justice that way of life could create.

I don't think it's an accident that America became the shining beacon of those same values after they were rediscovered at the end of the Renaissance in the surviving writings of those particular worshippers of those particular gods. And I worry how much longer we can keep them in a world where, the gods help us, people are suddenly noticing the conflicts between the values of Hellenic pagan democracy and Christian monotheistic dictatorship and consciously choosing the latter. And I sure as all holy gods don't think it helps when even the vast majority of the Pagans believe, or act as if, the gods who co-created and endorsed that way of life that we've so benefited from in this country over the last couple of hundred years were just a convenient fiction, any more than I think that it's a coincidence that the generation of Athenians who were taught by the (wealthy-elite-funded) "philosophers" to call the historical reality of the gods "the lies of the poets" were the generation who fell into slavery to the Spartans, then their own wealthy aristocrats, then the Macedonians, then the Romans, and then the Church, and then the Caliphate, never actually gaining even a semblance of freedom for thousands of years.

So whenever I contemplate going to a Pagan gathering, I find myself confronting two awkward propositions. First of all, I feel like the only non-atheist in the room, practically the only guy in the whole gathering who actually believes that the gods have an external verifiable reality that extends beyond wishful thinking. And secondly, I find myself in the company of hundreds of people who are just as wrong about the provable facts of other history as the Flat Earthers and the Lamarckians and the young-earth Creationists are. And when they start nattering on about these things, and expecting me to agree with them because I'm some kind of a Pagan too, it puts me in a very uncomfortable situation.

(That, sad to say, is probably why I found it so easy to make excuses not to go to St. Louis Pagan Picnic this year.)

You know, I spent two weeks trying to boil the preceding 16 paragraphs down to a sentence or two before I gave up.

The Independent/Southern Baptist doctrine of soteriology (theology of salvation) is that Adam's sin (not Eve's sin, but Adam's) resulted in an actual change in the nature of the human soul. Original Sin is not, in their interpretation of the Scriptures, a historical event but a condition: the condition in which an inherited part of your soul is permanently and irretrievably infected with "sin nature." That sin nature has two irreversible, unresistable side effects: it creates in you a permanent impulse to sin, and it stains your soul in such a way that it is repulsive to God, such that your whole soul is inadmissible to God's personal presence. Their interpretation of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ is that through this act, and through the teachings of his divinely inspired apostles, God created a way for you to change this. (You've probably seen this over-simplified as Campus Crusade for Christ's Four Spiritual Laws.) First, you must do two things as a pre-requisite for the third: you must sincerely repent of all of your past sins, and you must wholeheartedly commit yourself to obedience to God through his revealed word. Having done so, you are now eligible for real baptism, baptism that counts, where as an act of overt public obedience to God you allow yourself to be submerged in water by someone who is already a Christian: when you come back up out of that water, the "sin nature" part of your soul is killed dead, drowned in the water.

In extremis, they argue, it is possible to do without the water baptism ... but it is not okay to want to do without the water baptism, nor even okay to put it off any longer than the minimum necessary. To do so is to show that your repentance and vow of obedience weren't sincere. But now here's the part that caught my eye, when taught it by real expert professional theologians. They argued that this death of the sin nature is a measurable, perceptible change. If you have submitted to Christ, repented your sins, and demonstrated your obedience through baptism you should be able to tell the difference in your self, and it should be visible to other people around you. Unlike the Catharist heresy, they didn't argue that you'll never sin again. External temptations still apply, conscious choice to sin is still possible, and if nothing else you have a pre-baptism lifetime of habits to break. But the Independent Baptists and Southern Baptists argue that the second-born soul is qualitatively different from the soul that is still infected with sin nature, and that that difference is clear to both the person who's been born again and to those around them.

To those of us of more scientific bent, the theology professors say, "If you doubt our hypothesis, reproduce the experiment and verify the experimental results for yourself." Unbeknownst to me at the time, this exact question was being looked at by scientists, specifically by psychologists and psychiatrists, but in the context of cults, not Biblical literalist fundamentalism. No, this qualitative change in personality after a religious conversion was an already observed scientific phenomenon. But the scientists had observed, again not that I found this out for a lot of years, regardless of which religion the subject converts to. The results have been demonstrated to be short-lived, regardless of what faith the person converts to or from, and this has resulted in documented cases of people becoming addicted to the "rush" that comes from religious conversion. But again, I didn't know that yet.

What I did know, in May of 1975, was that I had spent half a year around people who clearly were "new men" (and new women), who clearly were an entirely different species than I was. That, combined with some other things going on in my life and my own experimental nature, lead me to attempt the experiment that had been put before me. And sure as heck, I did become a qualitatively different person, in ways that are hard to explain still. I became tremendously more compassionate. I became substantially more mystical and spiritual, aware of divine presence at all times. Scientific progress still mattered to me, and cultural progress, but now whole ranges of human endeavor that I'd never cared about also became things that mattered to me, including but hardly limited to religion and public service. I planned out a life for myself as someone who would go on to college, get a degree in math, and come back to a place like Faith Academy (if almost certainly not that particular school) to teach math and sciences myself. When I went on to a Christian college, Taylor University, my sense of mission shifted when I found out that I was even better at computer science than I was at math or teaching, but that sense that my life was a mission of service to others and that I was submitting to God's will as revealed to me through regular devotion, reading of his word, and sensitivity to his guidance in my life didn't change.

But long before I discovered the (often brilliant) music of the earliest of the gospel rockers, Larry Norman, I started to discover some of the same problems that he had with Biblical literalist Christianity: cultural problems. Christian fundamentalism is infected ... no, that word isn't strong enough, is infested with some truly obnoxiously reactionary cultural values, absolutely none of which are defensible from a plain reading of the Christian scriptures. You've seen me rant about this subject at substantial length before; those of you who haven't, check any of the stuff I've written under the "religion" tag. That made it an awkward fit for me, culturally. No matter where I am or what I'm calling myself, one great constant of my life is that I'm from Missouri (as the man said), you can't just tell me I'm wrong, you have to show me. And if you can't do it, and I can show that the facts are on my side, not yours, I'm not knuckling under just because you're older than me or some church elected you to some office or you've published some book. It was true before I became a fundamentalist, it stayed true when I was one, and it's still true to this day. That is just how I am.

But that was a problem I was willing to live with. No, by the early 1980s, several years into my walk with Jesus, I had a bigger problem than that: polyamory. One thing that clearly did not change when I went down into the water and came back up, despite ample other evidence of the spirit, is that I did not acquire a spirit of jealousy or possessiveness about other people. And while I was willing to submit my life to God in monogamy since that was his expressed will, one thing kept itching at me: what makes him right about this? That led me back to a subject that my theology instructors had alluded to as the problem of justice: when we say that God is just, what do we mean? Is there an abstract standard of justice, higher than God in authority, that we judge him against and find that he complies? Or do we call him just because, as the creator of the universe and its rules, he gets to decide what justice is and therefore it's whatever he wants to do? The longest meditation on this in the Bible is the book of Job, and I spent a lot of time reading and studying it before I came to the following conclusion: God's answer to Job is, "I get to say what's just and what's unjust because I'm bigger than you. If you were bigger than me, you'd get to tell me what justice is."

Did I mention that after a lifetime of being bullied I recognize bullying when I see it, and I'm never okay with it? Not even a little? I cannot cure myself of the belief that the word "justice" means something independent of any God's definition of justice, and the God of the Bible does not live up to any standard of justice that I recognize.

Once I was out of my own tiny neighborhood and traveling even a little, I also saw something that started to cast some serious doubt on this whole "new man" thing. I started seeing people who cared passionately about other people, and who cared passionately about things other than jobs and cars and stereo equipment and sports, and who were determined to do the best they could to make themselves better people and to make the world a better place who weren't Christian. Eventually it slowly dawned on me what I really was seeing: not a difference in the soul, but a difference of social class. Because of the determination to take over the country that spread throughout Christian fundamentalism in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, huge numbers of fundamentalist parents, regardless of social class, developed the fierce determination to put their kids on the college prep track, en route to positions in the upper middle class. I had grown up in a world where people were perfectly comfortable living working class lives (something much easier to do before Reagan, dammit), where people had no such ambition.

The Bible's own test for a false prophet is laid out all the way back in the books of Moses. If, even the Bible agrees, somebody says "thus sayeth the Lord" and anything they say in God's name turns out to not be true, then they are a false prophet. All of the prophets of the Christian God agree that there is a qualitative difference between Christians and those who have not been redeemed from sin. I found this to be a false prophesy, that there were no differences that could not be explained by equivalent levels of spirituality and equivalent determination to display the class signifiers of the upper middle class, regardless of which religion was professed. All of the prophets of the Christian God agreed that God had told them that it was impossible for anybody to love two or more people equally. I found this to be a false prophesy, something that was clearly not true of me or of several other people I'd known. More and more, whenever I took the specific claims that Christianity makes that are distinct from the claims that other religions make and tested them against external reality, I found that 100% consistently Christianity was wrong. And after struggling with this for a year and a half, it dawned on me to ask myself an even more direct question. (I'm slow.) I had often heard what I believed to be the voice of God telling me what to do or not to do. Could I think of even one example, any time in the preceding seven years, that God had told me something I didn't already know and turned out to be right?

No.

That left me with a strong sense that there was value to mysticism, spirituality, and religion themselves. I'd seen that value in my own life, and in the lives of many other people. But it also left me free to shop for a religion that seemed to me to be more consistent with how I knew the world to work, with the facts as I knew them. Being from St. Louis, and science fiction fannish, and St. Louis science fiction fandom being the birthplace of that religion, I suppose it's no surprise that over the course of July 1983 I ended up in Neopagan Witchcraft, one of the only religions in the world that's entirely comfortable with polyamory and that claims to have respect for science, math, law, history and all other forms of the search for knowledge and truth while still having a place for personal mysticism and intense spiritual practice.

Because most of you are smarter than I was back in 1983, you can probably see some of where this is going.

Eris' name, I keep trying to trim this down to a couple of paragraphs, running into things that won't make any sense if I don't explain them, and watching it balloon back up. So even though I said yesterday I'd cover the transition from secular progressivist to Christian fundamentalist to Neopagan Witch in one journal entry, sorry, forget it because I can't do it.

On my first day of school in 1966, it was very important to my north St. Louis county classmates to determine if I was Catholic, and therefore OK to beat on, or Protestant, and therefore available to help them go over to the Catholic school next door and beat on those kids. Here's the funny thing I forgot to mention yesterday: I had no idea what they were asking. I had heard the word "Christian" in my life, but not often enough to remember the word with any precision, let alone define it, so I almost did get myself beat on because all I could remember was that our family's religion started with a C -- but, I hastened to explain when they asked, no, the word "Catholic" didn't sound like the word I was trying to remember. Like pretty much everybody else that first year, they just wrote me off as retarded; I mean seriously, I'm sure they thought, who doesn't know if they're Protestant or Catholic unless they're retarded?

When I went home and asked, I still didn't get a coherent answer, and there turned out to be a whole complicated set of reasons for that that didn't surface for almost another decade. You see, Mom had been raised Baptist ... but that's giving her family too much credit, I was later told. The family considered themselves to be Baptist; they considered Mom not so much a daughter or (after being sent away after her mother's divorce) a niece or whatever. To the relatives who agreed grudgingly to take her in, one or more of which almost certainly brutally sexually abused her, Mom was a slave, and slaves don't go to church with decent people. And that's more than I know about the Man of Concrete. I know from hearing it from his parents that they raised him Catholic. I know from something Mom said that Dad considered himself a very-much ex-Catholic, that he had some kind of grudge against the Catholic Church that left him with a fierce determination to never let the Church he was raised in ever touch him or his family in any way ever again. What was the nature of his grudge? He carried that secret, if few others, to his grave; even his sister, who as far as I know still is a good Catholic, is baffled.

How all of this affected me and my baby sister was that Mom inherited from her extended family a vague sense of Baptist tribal identity, but no idea at all what that meant; Dad thought of himself as a bitter ex-Catholic who was still vaguely Christian, although he could most accurately be described as a self-taught Christian New Ager. We kids got almost nothing in the way of religious education or upbringing; my sister perhaps more than me but even her only a trace. So it was hardly a long jump for me, or particularly disappointing to Dad or more than vaguely disappointing to Mom, when I started devouring books on science and science fiction during the Space Race, came to the same conclusion that Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins have so famously been publishing lately that all religion was based on indefensible superstition and dishonesty, and concluded that I was an atheistic secular progressivist.

But my parents' lack of strong religious identification posed a very serious problem for them over the summer of 1974, and that problem very quickly became my problem. You see, even though the race riots in the local school system were starting to die down, that school district was starting to acquire a very ugly reputation for drug-dealing and random violence. My parents concluded that they could trust my sister to take care of herself in a fight but couldn't trust her around drug dealers; they concluded that I could be trusted not to gamble with drugs but worried that my luck at escaping from violence was going to run out. (And they didn't even know how close it had come to having done just that the year before.) So getting us kids out of the public school system became a very urgent concern, something that had to have something done about it right then, before my freshman year of high school. But the choices then were more or less the same choices now:

• Catholic school: flatly out of the question to both parents
  
• Lutheran Church Missouri Synod school: something they barely knew anything about but concluded they couldn't afford anyway
  
• Upper-class college prep school: completely unaffordable without a scholarship, and my parents' marriage wouldn't have survived the revelation of enough financial details (specifically, where all the money Dad was making was going) for us to get scholarships
  
• Home-schooling: both parents had a 3rd grade education; Mom wasn't terrribly widely read, and Dad worked too many hours to be much help
  
• A small chain of fundamentalist home-school-assistance programs and church-run schools called the Missouri Union of Christian Schools: Hobson's choice

And that's how I ended up being told, in one of the only major decisions about my life in which I wasn't consulted or given a vote, that I was to start at Faith Christian Academy, a small Independent Baptist run school founded by famous conspiracy-theory author John Stormer, in September of 1974. As a secular progressive, the prospect of being sent to a school system run by paranoiac Bible-thumpers scared me senseless. I quickly brushed up on enough Christian dialect and Biblical lore to hopefully pass for Christian myself, and hoped to somehow improbably fail to be noticed as the pink monkey in the proverbial cage full of brown monkeys. Later on, I found out that my act hadn't fooled anybody; that kind of thing is hard to fake, and as with any undercover job it's the little details that anybody inside would know but no outsider would understand the significance of that trip you up. But, and here's the fascinating part, that wasn't what most fascinated my teachers and classmates about me ... or me about them.

I may not have grown up with the same attitudes about religion or race that my neighbors had in old north county, but I had absorbed the same priorities they had, namely that there are only four things in the whole world that are worth thinking about very much: jobs and cars and stereo equipment and sports. Except that for me, already by 1974, I had substituted "science fiction books" for "sports" in that sacred list. But nowhere on that list is "grades." And you may remember from other personal history entries that I was testing as having a college-sophomore level of education in every subject but math while I was still 7, so there was no way I could sustain the effort needed to do any homework or to do any class project that couldn't be completed in class. I napped or goofed off or read during classes, blew off all homework and projects and papers and reading, and counted on my test scores to maintain a minimally passing C-minus grade. Other kids I'd known in my life had to work harder to sustain that C-minus grade, and resented me for that. But never, ever, ever before in my life had I ever met a child or adult who thought that there was any point to getting a grade above a C. Well, yeah, a few teachers, but we wrote off their opinion on the subject as biased. In the school system I grew up in, even the nerdiest of the apple-polishers didn't bother to aim much higher than a high B. Why bother? It was a working class neighborhood; whatever job you started when you graduated from high school was only going to care that you passed, and there were always better things to do with your time and energy.

So when a high school jock came up to me after one of my first classes at Faith with a ticked-off look on his face, I figured it was just my first beating at the hands of this school's athletes, and took off running. But it was a smaller building, with fewer places to run, and they knew it a lot better than I did. And were baffled as to why I'd run, because all he wanted was to ask me a question. "Look," he said, "even I can tell that you aren't even trying in there, that you could do a lot better if you tried. Why not? Everybody else is, and that you're not is ticking us off." Not very many days later, a cheerleader, a sub-species of human that had never even noticed me before, stopped me in the halls to ask, concern written all over her face, if there was something wrong at home and that's why I wasn't paying attention in class or turning in homework? I spent months bumping my nose on that. It seemed like every time I turned around, I ran into somebody else who was baffled by that part of me. It turned out that they could understand why the obviously-faking-it kid was pretending to be born again, what I was afraid of there. But that I wouldn't try to get the best grades I could? Unimaginable; they'd never in their lives met anyone like that. And when I realized that, I began to wonder what the heck planet I'd landed on?

That same first semester of high school was also the first time I ever bumped into the intensely intellectual world of professional-level theology. It was a mandatory 4-year subject at Faith, taught exclusively by graduates of Dallas Theological Seminary who were convinced that yes, teenagers can master as deep an understanding of the full text of the King James Version of the Bible and of the history of theological dispute from the Church fathers to the present as any seminary grad student came away with. And it was in this context that I ran into an argument that rocked me all the way to the bottom of the foundation of my soul: that the 20th century Biblical literalist interpretation of the doctrine of soteriology, the theology of salvation from sin, was an experimentally verifiable scientific theory.

Gah, this has run way too long even with my trying to trim out as many irrelevancies as possible. I'll finish it up tomorrow, hopefully with room to explain how I left fundamentalist Christianity, and Christianity altogether, after I finish explaining how I became a born again fundamentalist Christian in the first place.

There's something that I've been struggling all week with trying to write. It occurs to me lately that it would be easier to explain if I first told you a story that phierma says that I haven't told in writing here yet, and that's the story of how I ended up becoming a born-again fundamentalist Christian in May of 1976 and how I came to leave that faith in July of 1983. To tell that story, I have to start even farther back, to my upbringing in a working-class neighborhood of far north county, Spanish Lake, in the St. Louis metro area in the 1960s. Perhaps this will interest some of you if for no other reason than that it'll end up being a glimpse into a world that you could never have imagined.

The most important thing that you have to understand about religious upbringing in working class north St. Louis county in the 1960s is that religion was not something that you were expected to have any concrete beliefs about. You weren't supposed to think about it very much, any more than you were supposed to think about anything at all. After all, while preachers and Sunday School teachers found things to occupy Sunday mornings talking about, nobody that I ever met thought that any of that, not even one single word of it, was either interesting or important. There were only a few things in this world that you needed to know. Good people go to heaven when they die. Bad people go to hell when they die. There are two religions in the world, Catholics and Protestants, and you either come from a Protestant family or a Catholic family. And which ever one you grew up with, all you need to know about the difference is that the other ones are all bad people who go to hell, and exist so that kids from your families can beat on kids from their families. Everything else was, like much of any kind of abstract thought, seen as an unpleasant distraction from the only important things in life: jobs and cars and stereo equipment and sports.

If you were a Protestant kid, it was an expected and natural part of your growing up that you would go to the public schools, even though your parents were likely to complain that the federal government was filling them up with black kids. (At the time I started hearing this, "filling up" in my case meant a total of 2 black kids in a school with over 300 white kids.) After school, it was fully expected that you would gang up with some of your fellow Protestant kids, and ambush the Catholic school kids on their way out of school and beat them up. It was, of course, also tolerated for you to sneak off campus and do this during recesses and lunch breaks, if there was a Catholic school close enough that you could run there, beat up some Catholic kids, and get back in time before the bell rang. If you were a Catholic kid, it was completely assumed that you would attend an all-white parochial school. During recesses and after school, it was a fully expected part of your natural childhood to beat up Protestant kids any time the numbers were on your side. This whole way of life didn't come crashing down until 1972, when north county became the official dumping ground for the last remaining inhabitants of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex after its demolition. For several years thereafter, white Catholic kids and white Protestant kids decided they had common ground. They, and the black newcomers to the neighborhood, then turned their substantial negotiating skills to agreeing upon official dates for each school's approximately monthly after-school race riot. On those days, white and black kids all knew what was expected of them, just as Protestant and Catholic kids had understood in a lesser way before. Instead of rushing to the buses to get a good seat for the ride home after school, they were all expected to report to the side yard of the school, all of the boys and nearly all of the girls. Once there, they were expected to find a kid of the same gender but the other color and beat on them with fists until everybody was tired, usually about 45 minutes later, and then all go home.

I want to stress, to those of you who are thinking how barbaric this was, two things. First of all, never once did I hear of anybody over the age of 14 engaged in this behavior. And secondly, in 8 years of Protestant/Catholic and